Buffalo, N. Y. Aug. 30, 1849.

Mr. Editor:—I was highly pleased to see in the North Star of the 10th, your plan for a National League. The necessity of such an organization, to draw out and embody the moral and intellectual power of this colored people of this country, is too obvious to need argument. Through the medium of such an organization we can manifest to the people of this country, that we have sufficient capacity to understand and appreciate our rights, and the ability and spirit to maintain them.

The general outline of your plan I think unexceptionable, with the exception of the 7th Article, relating to the time and place of holding the annual meetings. If a permanent place is to be appointed, it should be more central; certainly not farther east than Buffalo or Rochester. It is evident that it would be as unjust to the western people to select New York or Philadelphia, as it would be to the eastern people to chose Chicago or Cincinnati. With regard to the time, I think the first of August the best period that could possibly be selected, for several reasons. The latter part of July, and the first of August is considered the dullest period of the whole season, for all kinds of business except farming; so that of course, the majority of persons could attend with less inconvenience then, than at any other time; and no day could be selected more appropriate for an oppressed and outraged people to assemble and devise plans for obtaining their just rights, and elevating their moral and intellectual character, than that on which nearly a million of their brethren were raised from a state of chattlehood to the full enjoyment of the rights and privileges of freemen. The annual celebration of West India Emancipation for 1850 has been appointed at Buffalo, and will probably be attended by large numbers; and I would suggest the propriety of calling a convention for the purpose of organizing the League, at the same time and place.

Yours for Union and Freedom.

J. W. WhitfieldWhitfield, James Monroe

James Monroe Whitfield (1822-71), barber and poet, was born in New Hampshire. During the winter of 1838-39, the Young Men's Union Society of Cleveland appointed Whitfield to deliver an address on the subject of emigration. Thus, as a youth of sixteen, Whitfield urged that blacks establish separate settlements in the United States or on its borders. By the mid-1850s he had become a major spokesman for black emigration. After he moved to Buffalo, New York, in 1841, Whitfield worked as a barber and wrote poetry. Several of his poems had already been published in the North Star when Douglass visited Whitfield in Buffalo in late June 1850. Recounting their visit, Douglass lamented, “That talents so commanding, gifts so rare, poetic powers so distinguished, should be tied to the handle of a razor and buried in the precincts of a barber‘s shop, and that he who possesses them should be consigned, by the malignant arrangements of society, to occupy a position so menial, is painfully disheartening." A delegate to the black convention meeting in Rochester in 1853, Whitfield also endorsed and attended the 1854 emigration convention in Cleveland and was commissioned to investigate Central America as a site for prospective black settlements. Convinced that “full and fair equality can be looked for, only through the existence of national organizations of the different races," Whitfield hoped that the emigration of black Americans would contribute to the emergence of a powerful and independent black nation in the American hemisphere. Before leaving Buffalo around 1859, Whitfield published a volume of poetry, America and Other Poems (Buffalo, 1853), which he dedicated to Martin R. Delany. Later poems appeared in the Liberator the San Francisco Pacific Appeal and the San Francisco Elevator. After the Civil War, Whitfield's principal residence seems to have been in San Francisco, though he also lived in Portland, Oregon, and in Idaho. Between 1864 and 1869 he was Masonic Grand Master of California. Joan R. Sherman, “James Monroe Whitfield, Poet and Emigrationist: A Voice of Protest and Despair," JNH 57: 169-76 (April 1972); Miller, Search for a Black Nationality 137-40; Delany, Condition of the Colored People 132; J. M. Whitfield to Editor, 15 November 1853, in FDP 25 November 1853; ASB 24 August 1850 .